Somewhere between prompting and agents, we skipped a step.
The industry moved fast. We went from “write me a good prompt” to “build me an agent” without much time in between. Somewhere in that transition, we stopped talking about AI workflows.
An agent gives the model a set of tools and says figure it out. It can handle situations you didn’t anticipate. It can combine tools in ways you didn’t design. And it sounds good in a pitch. Getting it to work reliably is harder than it looks.
A workflow is a predefined series of steps. Each one focused. Each one testable. The model handles one subtask at a time, which means it stays precise. When something breaks, you know where to look.
Agents are the right call when the problem is genuinely open-ended. Most problems aren’t.
Start with workflows. Reach for agents only when the problem genuinely requires it.
Predictability is the product. It’s what your users are paying for.
